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Active Imagination • Quotes
8 months ago
Every person must live the inner life in one form or another.
Consciously or unconsciously, voluntarily or involuntarily, the inner world will claim us and exact its dues.
If we go to that realm consciously, it is by our inner work: our prayers, meditations, dream work, ceremonies, and active imagination.
If we try to ignore the inner world, as most of us do, the unconscious will find its way into our lives through pathology:
Our psychosomatic symptoms, compulsions, depressions, and neuroses.
It may be called meditation or deep relaxation, quiet time or downtime. Whatever it’s called,
It’s a time away from outside stimulation, during which inner turbulence can settle,
And we have a chance to become more familiar with ourselves.
How can one ever know the rest of a dream? One technique that Jung pioneered was completing the dream.
Jung claimed that dreams, like the classical Greek drama, typically had four distinctive phases that Aristotle described:
Introduction, development, and then a crisis, followed by the lysis or culmination. Most dreams cease in the crisis phase;
Nightmares always do. Jung felt continuing the dream via active imagination can be revealing and healing.
The image created by the unconscious and the ego interact,
And in this interaction, they create the necessary tension to evoke the transcendent function.
Such a scenario usually occurs in experiences that Jung called active imagination.
Active imagination is a very difficult, very powerful technique.
It has a tremendous healing power if handled well, as well as a great potential for harm.
It can over-stimulate the psyche, lead to over-identification with archetypal forces and lead to psychosis.
Active imagination is an experiential method. It is a dialogical method.
It is a conversation between the ego and the unconscious or, more specifically,
Between the ego-image and non-ego images that emerge spontaneously.
By active imagination Marie-Louise Von Franz meant the opposite of passive daydreaming:
She meant an activity that engaged the conscious mind in dialogue with the unconscious.
She considered it the most powerful tool in Jungian psychology for achieving wholeness.
Jungian analyst and author June Singer noted that active imagination
Is often a path to shadow work because what it reveals is very often those rejected voices in us.
Depth psychology attempts to establish a dialogue between consciousness and the unconscious. It does so by an approach that utilizes symbolism,
Such as is found in dreams, fantasies, body language, art and ritual as a bridge between conscious and unconscious.
Depth psychology differs from other forms of the discipline in that it is an effort to approach the whole person,
To undertake dialogue with the essential mystery we all embody. We cannot undertake this deepened conversation without engaging the unconscious.
Symptoms represent the protest and constructive criticism of the psyche.
We may not experience it at the time, and we may ask, quite understandably from an ego standpoint:
How quickly do I get rid of these? What is the right technique or the right medication?
Instead, we should ask: What is it that is wishing further expression in me?
What is neglected or repressed or split off or cut off? What is it that wishes an audience with me?
Conscious and unconscious do not make a whole when one of them is suppressed and injured by the other.
If they must contend, at least let it be a fair fight. This means open conflict and open collaboration at once.
The problem of psychotherapy is: people have problems. Why? Because they don’t know how to listen to themselves
And their own impulses, their own truth, their own myth. Why don’t people all follow their inner passion?
Because the outside world overwhelms them. If you are never alone, you cannot know yourself.
If you can talk to it you get into relationship with it. You can either be possessed by a content constellated in the unconscious,
Or you can have a relationship to it. The more one suppresses it, the more one is affected by it.
If we don't actively offer the unconscious a means of expression, it comes out in destructive, undermining, involuntary fantasy material.
By dialoguing with our shadow we lift enormous projections of animosity or envy off of others.
It is hard enough to live our own lives, and everyone is better served if we concentrate on our own individuation
Rather than getting stuck in the agendas of others.
When we are beset by suicidal ideation we must ask the psychological question. What part of me wants to die?
That question not only yields insight but also shifts something in the psyche.
The dark force is no longer against us but works with us.
I had a male patient who was having trouble in his relationships, so I asked him to talk with his anima.
Well, his anima informed him that he neglected her. So in a slightly unreflective moment,
He promised his anima that he would talk to her every day, if only for five or ten minutes. His anima said, Yes, all right, but keep to it.
He promptly forgot all about the promise he'd made to his anima and over the next month experienced the most awful psychosomatic symptoms.
I had not inquired about his promise in our sessions because I knew he was an ethical and very decent person and I didn't want to play the governess.
But now, as he was suffering such unpleasant symptoms, I said, my God, have you forgotten to talk to your anima? He said, yes, I have. I said, well, there you are!
He apologized to his anima and his symptoms disappeared. This case shows that if you promise something in an active imagination,
it is just the same as if you promise it to a real human being. It counts, and you have to follow through and completely integrate the experience.
Integration is the last stage of active imagination. At the point at which the ego gains an insight,
It must make a total effort to integrate that insight into its outer life.
If I am unable or unwilling to practice my new wisdom in outer world, then the active has failed.
Weaving has to do with fantasy work. Creative fantasy is a web. If you do an active imagination you weave a cloth
And that is why it has to do with the idea of destiny, because the unconscious fantasies of people are their destiny.
Dreams produce their own kind of transformation within the psyche,
But when the ego becomes more consciously involved either in interpretation
Or in active imagination, the degree of transformation is greater.
It is a curious fact that dreaming decreases dramatically when one does Active Imagination.
If you take this art seriously as a way of meditation, you actually assimilate the material
Of the unconscious before it needs to come up in dream form.
I believe that in its higher form as opposed to fantasy,
Its lower or ego-related form, imagination is the bridge to the transpersonal realities of the soul,
That transcendent part of the personality we have called the Self.
More Quotes:
General
Unconscious
Synchronicities
Dreams
Active Imagination
Mythology
Shadow
Anima
Individuation